A couple of weeks ago I was rearranging my collection of Raspberry Pi’s that live in the attic (A Kubernetes cluster, LoRa gateway and a few other things) and I was having problems remembering exactly which was which as a few of them have the same Pimoroni Pibow case in the same colours. I decided it was time to actually label them all to make life a little easier.
My first thought was a Dynmo device, but I decided that I didn’t want one of the original plastic tape embossing machine and the newer printers get expensive quickly. I did go down a rabbit hole around Brother label printers that come with Linux printer drivers, but decided I didn’t actually need that level of support.
I ended up grabbing a D11 Bluetooth Thermal Label Printer from Amazon. It comes with a roll of stickers 12×40 mm and can print text, numbers emoji, barcodes or QR codes. There are many different sized stickers with a selection of borders, background prints or transparent and even a glow in the dark version.
The rolls have NFC tags to identify the size and type of stickers currently installer in the printer and it updates the app with this when you try to print.
It uses an Android (and iOS) app to create the labels and then send them to the printer. The app is pretty intuitive, the only slight niggle is that if you want to save pre-built layouts you need to sign up to a online account. This is not a problem if you are just doing one off labels for different things.
Summary
It has solved the problem I bought it for, we will see how the thermal paper holds up over time but most of the labels are on the underside of the Pibow cases so should be out of direct light most of the time.